Our View - Saturday

WIKIPORNIA: SITE HOSTS KID PORN
Wikipedia must remove ‘Virgin Killer' photo

Aword of advice to the people in charge of Wikipedia, the top online encyclopedia: Don't be stupid. Remove the kiddie porn from your site, do so now, and don't let it show up again. Remove it, or lose your credibility with most of middle America and possibly face child pornography charges.

And a word of advice to parents: Block Wikipedia from your children unless and until Wikipedia removes the infamous "Virgin Killer" photo.

Everyone knows the Internet hosts an endless sewer of porn. But it also hosts a seemingly limitless vault of valuable information, and Wikipedia has played no small role in presenting useful information in a simple, organized and mostly credible fashion. But today, the encyclopedia has ventured into porn, and amazingly administrators of the site seem confused as to what they should do.

At issue is the encyclopedia's entry for the 1976 album "Virgin Killer" by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. The album was banned in the United States because its original cover featured a pre-pubescent girl - completely nude, in a provocative pose with her legs spread and only something resembling a windshield crack covering her genitals. She appears about 10.

Back in the '70s, when the band came under intense public criticism for trying to sell an album decorated with kiddie porn, the rock stars tried to wax philosophic. They explained that the depiction was something sympathetic. Wikipedia reports that the band claimed to be expressing the dilemma of "a little girl who doesn't know about the bad things in life." What bad things? Well, "time" for one. That's right, time. "Time being a virgin killer," Wikipedia reports.

That's a lot of mumbo jumbo, dope-headed rock star nonsense. The band, for its own selfish gain, decided to distribute music wrapped in kiddie porn.

The FBI is reviewing the image, as it appears on Wikipedia, to determine whether it violates U.S. child porn and obscenity laws today. Clearly it violated them in '76, because the album was banned. If the FBI considers it OK today, that will only reveal that American standards have dipped so far that we now accept pornographic public displays of child exploitation. And don't be surprised if that's the case, after decades of pop-star girls earning millions for parading themselves like tramps in the name of selling records. Even the Hannah Montana actress has gone sensual.

Wikipedia has initiated a forum so people can opine about the appropriateness of the photo. It has locked the page so that it can't be edited, stating: "This page is currently protected from editing until disputes have been resolved."

What disputes? The picture is indisputably inappropriate for a general audience research tool. It may or may not be considered illegal by the FBI, which has to base its determination on our incredibly convoluted body of judicial precedent best summed up with the famous words of the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who defined obscenity as: "I know it when I see it."

But this isn't first and foremost about the FBI's opinion. For Wikipedia administrators, the mere fact that FBI investigators have launched an investigation should tell them it's beneath their standards. And if it's not, parents should begin to immediately add Wikipedia to their lists of Web sites children must avoid.

The picture is disgusting, exploitative and dangerous. It serves the interests of none other than pedophiles. It's a veritable assault on children by the leading encyclopedia. The legality of hosting it should be a minor consideration for Wikipedia administrators. Legal or not, it's harmful and wrong. They have a responsibility to do the right thing. If they don't, the public will once again question the value of unfettered free speech. Freedoms survive only if those who use them don't abuse them.

Take it down, Wikipedia, or face the wrath of a public weary of liberal eggheads who seem confused regarding the propriety of material that's no more than trash.

MORE EGGHEAD ‘ART'

Conservatives have no national leader, and every day it seems the left has taken control of politics, culture and art throughout the free world.
As such, modern "artists" have embarked upon projects reminiscent of the '60s and '70s, when con men could land federal grants and demand top dollar for expressions no more profound than smeared feces or religious symbols in urine.

Today, as told by Newsweek, a German artist wants to display a terminally ill patient in a gallery as an art exhibit. A Costa Rican artist displayed a starving dog on a chain that kept him inches from his food. At Yale, a so-called artist claimed to repeatedly get pregnant, each time inducing an abortion for the sake of art. Aliza Shvarts tried to exhibit her induced-abortion exhibit by smearing blood on a sheet. She told the Yale Daily News, as quoted in Newsweek: "For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation . . . is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood." In other words, was it hers or the child's?

To Yale's credit, administrators banned the airhead's exhibit. Amazingly, their decision has become a First Amendment controversy. In the Yale Daily News, Yale art lecturer Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: "The University has decided not to allow the rest of us to make up our own minds. I am considerably more troubled by their action than by hers."

Free speech doesn't mean the right to subject students at a private university to an obscene display of blood from an abortion. If it does, we must invoke First Amendment protections for the first "artist" who displays a pool of his vomit on the floor of a private art gallery as an expression about the inner conflicts of man if the gallery owner objects. Could someone please hit society's "recalibrate" button? It seems we're going insane.